Present financial management applications provide numerous tools for budgeting, entering, and tracking spending behavior. For example, a user might create a monthly budget for food expenditures, enter food-related spending over a period of time, then run a report to compare actual food-related spending with the pre-defined budget. This method of financial management requires that the user define a budget for each spending category that the user wishes to track. For example, if the user wishes to track food, mortgage, education, tax, clothing, and entertainment expenditures separately, the user must define a separate budget for each of these spending categories. Expenditures not linked to a particular budget are not included in budget reports.
Many users do not wish to create a formal budget for each spending category as described above. For example, a user may wish to track spending habits over time, without assigning a fixed upper bound for a particular category. Further, the user may not have either the time or resources to determine a baseline spending target.
In order to compare current spending with an average of past spending in a particular spending category, a user traditionally obtains a report providing historical spending data for the spending category, then perform manual calculations to obtain the average for comparison with current spending. For example, the user might obtain a report detailing a history of food-related expenditures, manually calculate the average of food-related expenditures for the last six months, then compare the average with the most recent month of food purchases.
Alternatively, irrespective of particular budgets or spending categories, the user may wish to track spending habits relating to a specific payee. For example, the user might wish to compare a current credit card payment with an average of past payments for the same credit card. Present financial management applications allow the user to select a payee (e.g., the credit provider) and view a history of all spending relating to that payee. In order to compare the current credit card payment with an average of past credit card payments, the user must perform a manual calculation as described above in relation to spending categories.